Texts for TAG experiments

textual phenomena

Issues that are difficult to model in XML (and that should ideally be present in the example text):

• Overlap
• Discontinuity
• Hierarchy, containment, dominance
• Artifactual hierarchy
• Multiple layers of annotations

Goal of this exercise: to propose queries for text, markup, annotations, or a combination of those components.

possible texts

• Raymond Queneau, Exercises de style
• Herman Melville, Moby Dick
• Virginia Woolf, Time Passes
• Henry Thoreau, Walden

Herman Melville

Particular to Moby Dick:

• lexical variety, vocabulary richness
• first person narrator, using direct address
• textual variation between the first British edition and the first American edition

MEL = a critical archive of the works of Herman Melville

• Contains transcriptions of the texts in TEI/XML and kept in TextLab (build by Nick Laiacona), an online editing environment that uses Juxta Commons to collate, annotate, and publish the editions. You need a login to access TextLab.
• At the moment TextLab contains the manuscripts of Billy Budd
• Interesting for collation: chapter 1 and chapter 4 of Moby Dick - revisions, variants, expurgations
• Revision narrative to provide editorial explanation of revisions

• Contextual information that is potentially interesting for querying:

  • Melville's personal library
  • Melville's travels (Itinerary Projects) - the use of place names in MOD
  • Moby Dick adaptations
  • Images and metadata related to Melville's use of art in "Moby Dick"

  When using text or information from the MEL project please attribute as follows: "Moby-Dick as Fluid Text," in "Versions of Moby-Dick," The Melville Electronic Library, an NEH-funded scholarly edition (http://mel.hofstra.edu/)."

Experiment LMNL encoding Moby Dick (MD) chapter 15

• textual perspective (sentences (s), paragraphs (p))
• documentary perspective (lines, l)
• quotes and speakers
• direct address
• nantucket dialect